Weather Eye: Vatican lightning strike

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Lightning struck the roof of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome just hours after the Pope announced his resignation — the lightning bolt can be seen at http://tinyurl.com/cthur8x. But was it a sign of divine wrath?

On July 9, 1984, York Minster was struck by lightning that caused a disastrous fire soon after the consecration of the Bishop of Durham, the Right Rev David Jenkins. The 13th-century south transept was badly damaged despite the roof having lightning conductors, and one theory is that a freak side flash from a lightning rod sparked the fire. The restoration cost more than £2 million. Some

Winter is officially drawing to a close today and despite the ups and downs in
temperature it was a fairly average winter, overall — so much for the
three-month Arctic freeze that some newspapers had predicted